Thermoacoustic Refrigeration

From creating comfortable home environments to manufacturing fast and efficient electronic devices, air conditioning and refrigeration remain expensive, yet essential, services for both homes and industries. However, in an age of impending energy and environmental crises, current cooling technologies continue to generate greenhouse gases with highenergy costs. Thermoacoustic refrigeration is an innovative alternative for cooling that is both clean and inexpensive. Through the construction of a functional model, we will demonstrate the effectiveness of thermoacoustics for modern cooling. Refrigeration relies on two major thermodynamic principles. First, a fluid’s temperature rises when compressed and falls when expanded. Second, when two substances are placed in direct contact, heat will flow from the hotter substance to the cooler one. While conventional refrigerators use pumps to transfer heat on a macroscopic scale, thermoacoustic refrigerators rely on sound to generate waves of pressure that alternately compress and relax the gas particles within the tube. The model constructed for this research project employed inexpensive, household materials. Although the model did not achieve the original goal of refrigeration, the experiment suggests that thermoacoustic refrigerators could one day be viable replacements for conventional refrigerators.